It’s not everyday that news from the customer relationship management segment make such big headlines. Zeta Interactive Inc., the sales automation provider co-founded by former Apple Inc. chief executive John Sculley, has acquired eBay Inc.’s CRM platform in what marks the official conclusion of the online auctioning giant’s exit from the enterprise technology market.

The divestment effort has previously seen its professional services arm, marketing suite and the hugely popular Magento e-commerce software sold to a consortium of private equity investors for a combined $925 million. The sale of its CRM division reportedly adds another $80 million to $90 million to the pile, in exchange for which Zeta is gaining a number of valuable technologies to augment its own lead management platform. At the top of the list is the data warehousing component of eBay’s CRM stack.

The auctioning giant has established a formidable reputation for itself in the analytics world thanks to internal projects such as the Pulsar event processing engine and the Kylin business intelligence framework for Hadoop, both of which have been released to the open-source community. Zeta says that incorporating the capabilities of eBay’s platform into its product will help clients use details about their leads more effectively and thus improve deal-making.

The company’s engineers will receive assistance in the integration from the roughly 300 employees of eBay’s soon-to-be former CRM division who are also coming aboard as of the deal. It’s a win-win situation all around. The workers get to keep their jobs, Zeta gains high-quality talent to bolster its continued development effort along with new customer accounts and the auctioning giant frees up more resources to focus on its core business.

The only party that doesn’t stand to benefit from the transaction is the competition. Salesforce.com Inc., Oracle Corp. and the other more established CRM providers in the market will find themselves up against a much together opponent once the deal closes and eBay’s assets are fully assimilated.

Image via DasWortgewand